Calling All Home Server Owners -- What Do You Use Your Servers For?

34

Quite fortunate that land is rather cheap here.

They’re all running in a detached bachelors pad, so I hardly ever hear them :stuck_out_tongue:

35

Where do I apply for the shittiest server contest?

Server: Pentium 4 / 256MB DDR RAM / 40 GB HDD + 1 TB HDD

Use: Samba file server. I know I should get an Orange Pi or something, however this is not powered on at all times so the power usage is not an issue. I just WOL it when needed, which is once or twice a week tops.

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36

I’ve got a Netgear NAS with 4x3TB HDD which serves me quite well for its purpose.
No other “server”-usage at home to speak of.

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37

Yeah I am! The thing I use it most for it the ability to get my home phone to ring on my mobile (Android SIP client) and getting voicemails sent straight (with attachment) to my email

In terms of the PSTN / freepbx interface I am using a linksys spa2102, I do need to think about replacing this as it’s get unreliable now :frowning:

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38

Hmm, I’ve been meaning to get a some IP telephony up and running for when I move house - any tips/pointers? Maybe this is best saved for another thread :')

39

I usually have some consumer grade hardware laying around, so I made cheap & dirty mining ring:

  • Intel DQ25JOE
  • C2D E6550
  • MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 6GB
  • Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 AMP! 6GB
  • Be Quiet Pure Power L8 530W

… I also added 2nd graphic card to my main PC, so it can mine too. It’s working pretty much 24/7 as it’s doing as remote desktop server too. Now it consists of:

  • i5 7600k @4.4GHz
  • Cryorig R1 Universal
  • HyperX Savage 2x8GB 2800MHz
  • MSI RX 470 Gaming X 8GB - BIOS modded
  • Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 AMP! 6GB
  • MSI Mortar Z270M
  • SielntiumPC Vero M1 600W

…as for the services I generally use servers outside my home :stuck_out_tongue: I have quite few of them :wink:

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40
  • Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650v1 @2.0Ghz C2 (SR0KQ)
  • 2x Coolermaster Hyper 412 Slim
  • Asus Z9PE-D8 WS
  • 64GB DDR3-1866Mhz
  • 4x256GB SSD

Used for

  • All things Centmin Mod testing
  • Docker

yes cases are overrated :grinning:

5157_asus-xeon-e5-2650v1-01
5157_asus-xeon-e5-2650v1-01800×904 119 KB

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41

Lol I like your fan placement / rigging

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42

yeah 120mm and 135mm fans :smile:

43

I only have one machine which isn’t used for desktop usage, it is;

  • i4770k (for motion detection on a lot of cams)
  • 2x 4TB H/W RAID 1
  • Blue Iris for IP Cams, Windows
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44

Nice! I’m planning on setting up a bunch of IP cams after the move in a few months. Was planning on running ZoneMinder on a server hidden somewhere in the house (because if an intruder finds it – bye bye evidence).

What IP cams do you use and would you recommend them?

45

Yes, hiding it is a good idea, a 2nd remote recording (low cpu is fine if you just record all the time on the remote machine and don’t use motion detection) is also a good idea if you have fast internet at home.

All the cameras I have work well, I like them.

I have 8 of these;
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0159ZJYF2/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

1 of these;

And 4 of these for the cage at work which I also record at home and remotely;
http://www.hikvision.com/us/Products_1_10533_i7579.html

I’ve not looked at zone minder, I use blue iris just because that was what looked good at the time and it gets constant updates. It is CPU bound though if you enable motion detection on all the cameras.

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46

I’m using unifi cameras at home and host the controller on a VPS :slight_smile: the cameras are creeping up in price thou :frowning:

47

Yeah IIRC you have to use unifi controller with unifi cameras? If so, I wouldn’t want to be vendor locked.

48

I used to have home servers, but it was so much quieter and easier to just send them to a datacenter.

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49

Yeah you do. And fair enough, we resell a lot of unifi kit so it makes sense. As far as I know the hikavision stuff uses it’s own controller too :confused:

50

They probably have one, but the IP cams are open standard and can be used in any ipcamera software.

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51

I still have a i3-6100/8gb ram/12tb hdd space running for plex and timemachine. Not really using plex that much anymore but it’s a very low power machine so I’ll let it idle with the backups.

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52

Have a couple at home, SC813’s & thin clients.

1 X E3-1220 running pfsense
1 X E3-1230 running Windows & security camera software
2 X Wyse thin clients
1 X Raspberry pi

First two are self explanatory on what they do. One thin client runs:

Grafana
Graphite
InfluxDB
Sensu/Redis/Rabbit

Second thin client runs RTL-AMR & a USB RF dongle.
Raspberry pi runs a few gpio temp & humidity sensors.

The thin client running RTL-AMR reads RF signals for kWh being broadcasted from my power meter. It allows me to graph power usage down to a few minutes. RTL-AMR collect sends the data to influxDB which I pull into Grafana.

Pfsense also pushes bandwidth to influxDB via Telegraf. The Raspberry pi uses sensu to execute checks for temp/humidity sensors and pushes them to Graphite, which is also pulled into Grafana.

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53

That’s awesome! Would love to do something similar with pulling power usage data into grafana.

I was using Grafana a bit about a year or two ago just for gathering server stats (cpu, ram, network info via collectd). Not sure if it was the way I set it up or if the data rate was too high, but the interface got rather clunky and I had issues loading it.

Might give it another shot in a bit, as I’d like to use it to pull in Plex usage data as well and have that visualized.